Undersea Mountain Photos: Brittlestar Swarm, More Found

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Undersea Mountain Photos: Brittlestar Swarm, More Found

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Brimming Undersea Mountain

An orange roughy glides over an undersea mountain, or "seamount," located off the eastern coast of New Zealand in a 2006 picture.

Results from a five-year project to document and study the world's seamounts, called CenSeam, were released this week. The project is part of a larger endeavor, the decade-long Census of Marine Life, which aims to document all ocean flora and fauna. The census's final summary of up to 230,000 species will be released October 4.

CenSeam brought together more than 500 scientists, policy makers, and conservationists from around the world to study the types of marine life that make their homes on seamounts and how the creatures are affected by human activity.

With CenSeam, seamount researchers finally have a way to pool their results and coordinate their projects, noted Karen Stocks, a CenSeam scientist at the University of California, San Diego.

"Historically, seamount research hasn't been coordinated at all," she said. "There would be an expedition, they would go to an individual seamount or seamount chain, and publish their results."

Photograph courtesy NIWA

Feeding Starfish

A bright orange brisingid starfish on a seamount in the Macquarie Ridge near New Zealand raises its arms to feed in 2008.

Like underwater cities, seamounts sometimes are home to much higher populations of marine life than the surrounding seafloor, CenSeam scientists have found.

The rocky surfaces on many seamounts offer a hard substrate for corals to attach to. Once a sizable coral population has been established, other creatures—such as sponges, sea anemones, starfish, and fish—can move in.

"They're undersea mountains that stick up from a flatter terrain, so they offer a variety of different depths. So if you've got a change of conditions, animals can find refuge up or down their slopes."